There’s an evident confidence in ‘Forest House’, revealed early with Little Less Lonely, a song in which the building harmonies and low-key acoustic backing allow Jenny Mitchell’s voice to wrap right around you.
Eleven quite different tracks follow, in what the 2019 NZ Music Awards’ Best Country Artist Tūī winning artist describes as “…an album of songs that reflect everything that happens within the four walls of a house. The new beginnings, the leaving. The opening, closing or slamming of doors. The good, the bad, the nostalgic and everything in between.”
It’s also an album that illustrates the growing strength in both her songwriting and voice, as she covers a dozen different styles, taking on almost as many character roles with natural ease.
Mitchell chose Australian producer/engineer Matt Fell, who has won four ARIA Best Country Awards, then took the vision for her fourth album even further, by searching as far as rural South Wairarapa for a suitable country house to accommodate a DIY studio plus her band and family members, for a week of recording.
The instrumentation may be acoustic but the songs themselves are very plugged into life, or lives, a number evidently about Mitchell’s own family experiences – traversing beauty and joy, but inevitably hardship and heartbreak – this being as much an exploration of the house of country music. Male voice duets (Daffodils with her father, Ron Mitchell, and Kasey Chambers’ cover Wildflower with long time band member and friend Mike Hood), add considerably to the generational picture.
Where The Water’s Cold will bring a smile to Tami Neilson fans, channelling a similarly powerful sass and lyrical irony. Sister, featuring her sisters The Mitchell Twins, is a song about support, “a shoulder, a hand, a soft place to land”. With a military snare motif and bagpipes decorating the bridge, it rollicks along in the manner of a singalong country dance tune with anthemic purpose. No surprise it’s a live favourite.
The album draws to a majestic close with the album-naming single Heart Like A House. Mitchell describes it as the album’s centrepiece, influenced by her upbringing “in a family who have always kept welcoming and hosting as a core value”. The subtext is of her own determination to build a life in music that is welcoming and safe for those working with and around her. There’s surely some irony that it comes just when she has left Aotearoa and set up home in a Melbourne apartment, building the next level in her music high rise clearly in mind.
